Still in the Hospital

Finally getting the chance to post some updates... Our laptop crashed upon arrival at MD Anderson and we are unable to use our cell phones in the hospital room. In this day and age, no wireless access is cause for complete and total panic! We kept our cool and I came home today to get some things done at the house, including posting our latest news and repairing the laptop...

Lauri is still in the hospital battling a low grade fever. Over the past several days, the people at MD Anderson have run two blood cultures to determine what kind of bug Lauri may have, and then determine what kind of medicine they can give to kill it. Unfortunately, the blood cultures have come back negative. We have also been watching Lauri's blood counts, especially her white blood cells, hemoglobin, and platelets. After bottoming out on Friday, her counts are all increasing, with her white blood cells over 2 (normal range is 4-10, bottomed out at 0.2).

We are hopeful that the increase in white blood cells will allow the body to naturally fight off whatever is causing Lauri to have a fever. Lauri's fever comes and goes. Sometimes her temperature is normal, below 100, and then it will shoot up to around 101.8. The doctors get concerned when the temperature climbs over 101, since it may indicate an infection.

The doctors require Lauri to have a white blood cell count greater than 1 (check), and no fever for 48 hours before allowing her to leave the hospital. Lauri ran a fever of 101.8 late last night, which puts us into Monday for a possible checkout date if her fever doesn't return. Unfortunately, her temperature was at 100.4 and rising at 4 pm today. Hopefully it will fall back down soon, or else the "checkout clock" will reset.

There are many reasons to feel frustrated with this whole process: the lack of knowing the cause, the ineffectiveness of the medications to this point, the constant want to just go home, the lack of rest, and many other reasons. But we have to look at the bright side, the chest pain has gone away, and Lauri's blood counts are on the rise. Even though the doctors are doing all they can, I'll bet you the body beats them out and kills this bug before they have a clue what hit us! Only time will tell...

We discussed with our doctor why this happened and the possibility of it happening again. Our doctor told us that these things just happen sometimes to patients with severely low white blood cell counts. Sometimes they never find out what causes it (the fever or the infection), and sometimes it comes back, while other times it doesn't. We hope to investigate preventative medicines with the doctor during our next visit.

I hope to have more frequent posts during the next few days. Stay tuned!